


keep dreaming, socrates

by meretricula



Category: Heroes - Fandom, New Amsterdam, Pushing Daisies, Torchwood, Tuck Everlasting - Babbitt, X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Immortality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-04
Updated: 2010-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-05 18:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,783
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/44686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meretricula/pseuds/meretricula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What would happen to Chuck if Ned died before he touched her again?</p>
            </blockquote>





	keep dreaming, socrates

Ned the piemaker died in bed on a Tuesday afternoon, in the presence of his dog, Digby, and his childhood sweetheart, Charlotte Charles, though to the knowledge of all the neighbors, she was the granddaughter of Ned and his deceased wife, Olive. Before Olive's death, when Ned and Chuck moved to the town where they currently resided, Chuck had posed as their daughter, but Ned's clearly advanced age had rendered that fiction implausible.

Ned, propped up on a mountain of pillows, looked at Chuck and smiled the sweet, nervous smile that had so endeared him to her when they were children, nearly eighty years ago. His hair was completely white and his face was now a mass of wrinkles, but the smile was the same. "Chuck," he said softly.

"I'm here, Ned," she replied immediately. "Are you hungry? Or thirsty? There's peach pie and peach iced tea, and I have gouda and gruyere in the cheese-box."

"Chuck," he repeated. "I love you."

"I love you, too." She leaned over him, looking as beautiful as she had the day she died. Ned reached out with a shaking hand and nearly touched her cheek, hesitating just as he had so many years ago in the funeral home. His hand fell to his side, the gesture incomplete, and his eyes drifted shut with a sigh. "Ned?"

He did not answer her.

"Ned!" Chuck felt tears start to well up, but she wiped them away quickly. Ned would not have wanted her to cry. She straightened her dress, adjusted the sheets on the bed, and glanced around to room to check, one last time, that everything was in order. Then she bent down and pressed her lips to Ned's, for the second and last time.

She waited for an interminable moment for something to happen - bright light, darkness, a tunnel with a voice calling her at the end - but nothing did, so she straightened back up again. Ned was dead. So was she, of course, but she was showing no more symptoms of it than she had in over sixty years. And now she was apparently stuck that way.

"All right, Digby," she said at last, kneeling beside the dog. He whined and licked her face. "I guess it's just you and me now." She wrapped her arms around Ned's dog, who, like Chuck and unlike the man they both loved, would never age or die, and cried - not for Ned, who was in whatever place good and noble men went when they died, but for herself and for poor loyal Digby, trapped in the real world without him forever.

*

There was nothing to hold Chuck, now that Ned had died, so she saw to it that he was buried near Olive and Emerson and drove herself and Digby away in Ned's car. Out of sentiment and vestigial caution, she left the plexiglass barrier up. Digby rode in back, and licked at her neck when he thought she wasn't driving fast enough.

The life of an itinerant piemaker and cheese connoisseur was a surprisingly uneventful one, until she happened to pick up a pretty blond girl who was hitch-hiking on an Arizona highway. Her name was Claire, and there was a look in her eyes that made Chuck feel unaccountably at ease.

"What brings you to Arizona?" Claire asked, the faintest hint of a Southern twang flavoring her voice.

"My - husband," Chuck said, the word strange in her mouth. She had never married Ned. They'd been in love all their lives, spent decades together, but even before Ned looked old enough to be her father, she'd been legally dead, and so there had been no wedding bells for her. Ned had desperately needed looking after, though, and she and Olive had spent so much time sharing the job between them that it would have been petty to complain that Olive was the one to get the official title. "My husband died, and I didn't want to stay at home anymore. So I took his dog and got in the car and drove."

Claire made a sympathetic noise. "I'm so sorry. Was it sudden?"

"No... no, I knew it was coming." Digby nosed at Chuck's ear, trying to cheer her up.

"You seem awful young to be a widow," Claire said, carefully.

Chuck's mouth twisted into something that might be charitably called a grin. "I'm older than I look.

"How about you, Claire? What occasion took you to the lovely desert state of Arizona?" She looked over at her passenger, but Claire was staring fixedly out the window.

"My mother's funeral."

*

Chuck drove Claire to west Texas, where she met up with a dark-haired man she said was her uncle, though he looked kind of young. Claire was happy to see him, anyway; she jumped out of the car and ran to hug him, calling, "Peter!"

He picked her up and swung her around a few times, and then he looked over at Chuck and his eyes narrowed. "What the hell are _you_?" he demanded. That was how Chuck found out that she and Digby were not alone.

*

Claire and Peter were more dramatically immortal than Chuck was, not that she minded. Ned had been the special one. She was just the living dead girl he'd accidentally granted eternal second life. She bled when she got cut; the wounds didn't heal any faster than they had before she died. Chuck didn't generally put herself in dangerous situations, though, so she wasn't worried that she'd need to put herself back together the way Claire did.

They knew other people, special people, but not other people who didn't die. Chuck asked, when Peter didn't mention any, but he went very still and his lips thinned. "I knew a guy, once," he said. "He wasn't a good person. He's gone, now." Chuck had to be satisfied with that.

*

Claire decided to stay with Chuck for a while. They traveled for a few days with Peter before he went his own way. Chuck wasn't sorry to say goodbye; she didn't like Peter, with his cold eyes and scary smile. Claire loved him, though, so she supposed they'd meet again.

"He wasn't always like that," Claire said, a few hours after Peter had turned left while they kept straight. "His brother - when Nathan died, it was... I think Peter was used to having someone to look after him."

Chuck nodded, and tried to be less judgmental. It had been hard for her to adjust, too. She'd been so used to having someone _to_ look after that just taking care of herself had been awful and foreign: cooking one serving of food, setting one place at the table, cutting one slice of pie. If she hadn't had Digby, maybe she would have become cold and bitter, too.

*

Chuck and Claire stuck together, mostly. Sometimes they settled in one place for a while; there was always someone who would buy Chuck's pies, and Claire was surprisingly handy at pretty much everything. They told everyone they were sisters, which people believed despite the fact that they looked nothing alike.

Every once in a while, they met other people like them. There was Peter, of course, who showed up and drifted away, revolving around Claire like a magnet with constantly shifting poles. It didn't seem to bother Claire, so Chuck let it go.

There were others, too. In a bar in Canada they met a soft-spoken girl with a Southern drawl and a white streak through her red hair, and a tough older man who was sharp with everyone else but gentle with her. He called her Marie and she called him Logan, though they'd used other names when they introduced themselves. In small-town America they ran into a family of four, even more bitter than Peter; Jesse Tuck had detached Claire from Chuck for a while, but she came back eventually, and Chuck asked no questions. There was a man in New York City whose name and profession and girlfriend kept changing, though his face always stayed the same.

Around 2100 the car broke down beyond all repair. Chuck thought it might be a sign that she'd been in America long enough, so she and Claire and Digby booked flights to England and started hitching rides. In Wales they met Jack, who flirted relentlessly and made Claire giggle like a little girl. Chuck didn't like him until he took her with him to lay flowers at an entire cemetery of empty graves.

"The bodies are in cold storage at the Hub," he said casually. "But there's no rules against putting up tombstones so long as the physical corpses stay where we can get our hands on them, so..."

He left flowers for all the absent dead, but roses for only two: a woman named Estelle, and a man (or at least, Chuck thought it was a man; she couldn't really tell with Welsh names) called Ianto Jones. The stone for Ianto was the most recent, and Jack sat by it for a few minutes, tracing the letters of his name and the numbers of his dates. He'd died an old man, but that wasn't exactly a big comfort when your lover was going to live forever.

"I was so pissed when I realized what Rose had done to me," Jack said suddenly. "Made me immortal and then buggered off to let me deal with the consequences. God, I could have slapped her. And I'd give anything to have her back now."

Chuck thought about that for a minute. Thought about Claire, who froze up whenever she heard the word "father" and cried herself to sleep clutching a pair of horn-rimmed glasses. About Peter, who would miss his brother like a severed limb for the rest of his very long life. She thought about the Tucks, who had lived for over three hundred years but never seemed to enjoy anything, and Marie and Logan, who didn't seem to miss anything or anyone so long as they had each other, and the man in New York City, who kept looking for a woman, because the city couldn't love him back.

But she had other memories, too: Ned and Olive and even Emerson, who'd called her "dead girl" to the last, plastic-wrapped kisses and pie-baking lessons. Sixty years more with Ned than she would have had if he'd let her die when her allotted sixty seconds were up. "I miss Ned," she said at last. "But I'm glad he brought me back. Life is wonderful, even when it's sad and everyone else around you dies." She smiled, and hugged Digby. "And it's not like I'll ever really be alone."


End file.
